Mushfiq Mobarak Publications

Financial, informational and other constraints lower the adoption of welfare-improving technologies amongst people living in poverty. Field trials have identified effective strategies to facilitate behaviour change. Researchers and policymakers need to apply this knowledge, and form institutional partnerships to implement solutions at scale.

Vaccines are changing the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, but in grossly uneven ways. Low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) face considerable obstacles in both receiving and distributing doses. To limit virus transmission, its devastating impacts, and opportunities for further mutations, this must change. Until it does, nonpharmaceutical interventions such as masking must remain a priority. Science invited global experts to highlight research and innovations aimed at quickening the end of COVID-19 in LMICs.

We document that an experimental intervention offering transport subsidies for poor rural households to migrate seasonally in Bangladesh improved risk sharing. A theoretical model of endogenous migration and risk sharing shows that the effect of subsidizing migration depends on the underlying economic environment. If migration is risky, a temporary subsidy can induce an improvement in risk sharing and enable profitable migration. We estimate the model and find that the migration experiment increased welfare by 12.9%. Counterfactual analysis suggests that a permanent, rather than temporary, decline in migration costs in the same environment would result in a reduction in risk sharing.

Mask usage remains low across many parts of the world during the COVID-19 pandemic, and strategies to increase mask-wearing remain untested. Our objectives were to identify strategies that can persistently increase mask-wearing and assess the impact of increasing mask-wearing on symptomatic severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infections.

We use a two-stage experiment to study how a short-term subsidy for a new product affects uptake, usage, and future demand for the same product (a new solar lamp). We use an auction design to gauge willingness-to-pay, and randomly vary the strike price across villages to create random variation in purchase prices and uptake across villages. Our main results are that subsidies do not adversely affect subsequent product use, but stimulate uptake. If subsidies depress future willingness-to-pay, then this effect is outweighed by additional learning about the benefits of the new product. The net effect is that short-term subsidies increase future willingness-to-pay. However; prices play an important allocative role, and lowering prices via subsidies encourages uptake by households with low use intensity. We do not find any evidence supporting social learning and anchoring beyond the initial sample of beneficiaries.

Widespread social distancing and lockdowns of everyday activity have been the primary policy prescription across many countries throughout the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. Despite their uniformity, these measures may be differentially valuable for different countries. We use a compartmental epidemiological model to project the spread of COVID-19 across policy scenarios in high- and low-income countries. We embed estimates of the welfare value of disease avoidance into the epidemiological projections to estimate the return to more stringent lockdown policies.

Can targeting information to network-central farmers induce more adoption of a new agricultural technology? By combining social network data and a field experiment in 200 villages in Malawi, we find that targeting central farmers is important to spur the diffusion process. We also provide evidence of one explanation for why centrality matters: a diffusion process governed by complex contagion. Our results are consistent with a model in which many farmers need to learn from multiple people before they adopt themselves. This means that without proper targeting of information, the diffusion process can stall and technology adoption remains perpetually low.

Despite numerous journalistic accounts, systematic quantitative evidence on economic conditions during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic remains scarce for most low- and middle-income countries, partly due to limitations of official economic statistics in environments with large informal sectors and subsistence agriculture. We assemble evidence from over 30,000 respondents in 16 original household surveys from nine countries in Africa (Burkina Faso, Ghana, Kenya, Rwanda, Sierra Leone), Asia (Bangladesh, Nepal, Philippines), and Latin America (Colombia). We document declines in employment and income in all settings beginning March 2020. The share of households experiencing an income drop ranges from 8 to 87% (median, 68%). Household coping strategies and government assistance were insufficient to sustain precrisis living standards, resulting in widespread food insecurity and dire economic conditions even 3 months into the crisis. We discuss promising policy responses and speculate about the risk of persistent adverse effects, especially among children and other vulnerable groups.

Recent studies find that observational returns to rural-urban migration are near zero in three developing countries. We revisit this result using panel tracking surveys from six countries, finding higher returns on average. We then interpret these returns in a multi-region Roy model with heterogeneity in migration costs. In the model, the observational return to migration confounds the urban premium and the individual benefits of migrants, and is not directly informative about the welfare gain from lowering migration costs. Patterns of regional heterogeneity in returns, and a comparison of experimental to observational returns, are consistent with the model’s predictions.

Even with comparable innate ability and performance, women may be subject to discrimination. We run a field experiment across 143 Malawian villages in which either men or women were assigned the task of learning about a new agricultural technology, and then communicating it to others to convince them to adopt. Objective measures of these communicators’ knowledge and adoption of the new technology show no gender gap in their ability to acquire, retain and use the information. Yet, micro-data on individual interactions from 6500 farmers show that other farmers are less willing to learn from female communicators, whom they perceive not to be as good at farming as their male counterparts. In spite of this, other farmers learn just as much about the technology when the communicator role is reserved for women, and they experience similar farm yields.